Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


StatusCake Review
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

StatusCake Review

KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep
edited March 2013 in Reviews

To give you an idea of my 3rd party monitoring experience, we started with BinaryCanary then to NodePing then added Pingdom for our public uptime reporting (something NodePing is lacking in) but switched from Pingdom to StatusCake because of Pingdom's monitor limit for their free plan and because StatusCake had a really nice feature for embedded reporting which allowed us to make a custom report for our status page. To clarify, we've paid for both BinaryCanary and NodePing while using the free plans for Pingdom and StatusCake.

We have no plans of ditching NodePing, the monitoring and alerts have been spot on every time and 1000 1-minute monitors for $15/month is an unbelievable value. Their public reports are amazing but are way to detailed for end users to find useful which is why we use another service for our status page.

Enter StatusCake...

StatusCake looks very impressive and we made an awesome public report from their embedded report, unfortunately the false alarms generated are too frequent forcing us to delete the monitors and remove them from our status page.

Today I woke up to 180+ StatusCake alerts that all of our data center's were offline but NodePing, Pingdom (still monitoring our Tampa location), 1 custom internal monitor, and 1 custom external monitor reported no packet loss all day. I am assuming these false alarms are due to the fact we only have the free plan so it's only using 1 monitoring server but the inaccuracy has caused us a lot of headaches because we had StatusCake as our public uptime report and clients were complaining about downtime they never experienced.

We've considered purchasing a paid plan, but we're hesitant to invest money into something that might not work. I've been waiting to see if the false alarms would improve but today they were so bad I just deleted all of the monitors out of anger. Since we've started using them a few weeks ago, we'd get a handful false alarms a day for a few minutes at a time. At one point last week it showed our networks with over 1 hour downtime in a single day and clients, who did not experience any downtime, were requesting SLA credit for the "downtime". We provided them reports from NodePing and Pingdom showing the monitoring was inaccurate which some accepted but I can only imagine how many took the StatusCake reports and shared them with their contacts or will use them in reviews they write about us.

Originally I thought that this was a complete fluke with out networks and had ignored it for a while hoping things would clear itself up, but then I went onto #lowendbox a few nights ago and found others reporting the same issues (I thought one of them even had a paid plan but I cannot confirm this).

What prompted me to write this review was that a lot of people on IRC and here have commented on how great StatusCake is and I really hope my experience is not the norm. I saw the new thread about the "Website Hosting Uptime Report" and noticed another LEB provider listed on there (one that signed up the same day as me and using it for the same reasons I was) and I happen to have a VPS with this provider that I use for monitoring and network troubleshooting, this provider shows a 98.9759% uptime out of 10,253 checks meaning they failed about 106 checks which my records do not reflect.

While this review may seem completely negative it was not my intention, I am posting it since I noticed @SCDaniel is active on here and would like for him to be aware of the situation I have experience and if others have a similar experience he can work on resolving it.

StatusCake is a really clean service and the presentation is the best I've seen from a monitoring company (NodePing could take some notes in that department). I really hope that my experience is not the norm which is why I welcome any positive reviews for this service so I can feel comfortable about picking up a paid service to continue using their awesome embedded reporting feature.

I would like to take the opportunity to make a suggestion that may improve the quality of service for free account users...

BinaryCanary's billing structure is based on the number monitors but this also counts each monitoring server as one monitor. So for example if a server is being monitored for SSH (port 22) and HTTP (port 80), that is 2 monitors. If you have 2 monitoring servers checking those 2 services then it's a total of 4 monitors. If you choose to only have 1 monitoring server monitoring those 2 services, they will automatically use a 2nd monitoring server as a double check if the first monitoring server reports either service down.

I know the above paragraph might be confusing but my suggestion is that if a monitoring server reports downtime then have a 2nd server double check that report to see if that monitoring server itself is accurate, if that monitoring server returns a false alarm then possible remove it from the monitoring pool until it can be manually checked for accuracy. I know this would require some complex code depending on the current backend setup, but it's just a suggestion for the future since your free plans are the gateway to getting people to upgrade to a paid plan.

Comments

  • Hi KuJoe,

    First let me start by saying if you’ve had an unsatisfactory experience then I deeply apologise. I’m afraid as you deleted the sites I am unable to dive into the details of exactly what was triggering the alerts but I do stress that before any alert is sent out there has to be 2 other servers that confirm the downtime before the alert is sent out. Looking at the email logs I see the type of downtime shown is very much like what you would expect if one our IP ranges was being blocked. If you could drop me an email to [email protected] with the following then I’ll be able to better assist:

    Check Type: TCP / HTTP / Ping check?
    Sample URL / IP:Port

    I’ve also free of charge upgraded your account to our best plan at my own personal cost - It is very much my hope that once we work out what exactly the issue was we can resolve it and have you come back and give another review.

    Kind Regards,
    Daniel

  • @KuJoe said:

    Agreed - originally looked into StatusCake when pingdom was having down time. however after testing them alongside multiple solutions that I use they just aren't ready for prime time.

    Many, many false alarms. No IPv6 support. Strongly dislike their themeforest paid admin template/theme, public status pages offer NO flexibility -- you wouldn't want to make them public etc.

    I think there's certainly room for a new player to come in and give pingdom a run for their money, unfortunately StatusCake isn't it.

    I'd hope that a real player like WSP would get real about non enterprise pricing. Since CA bought nimsoft it's also gone to s*

  • I really like my statuscake account. I have about 50 checks on it or so and they go off at the same time as my nodeping and observium and zabbix report downtime. And I really like their status pages. They have javascript code that you can embedded in your website that shows uptime of your servers. And you can change 100% of the CSS.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    I agree about @NodePing's public reports - they are not very end-user friendly. For the monitoring itself, they've been great in the time I've been using them.

  • @raindog308 said: I agree about @NodePing's public reports - they are not very end-user friendly.

    Agree!
    https://nodeping.com/reports/checks/ml28bwu0-z1vq-4i3s-8zvr-aitgv7c3nj1h

    So ugly

  • I just cancelled all of my Pingdom stuff, I might give StatusCake a try.

  • Thanks for the many kind words on our accuracy. We appreciate it.
    As for our reporting... I couldn't agree more. It's definitely something we lack but we're working on it. Feedback is very much welcome and drives much of our development.

  • RobertClarkeRobertClarke Member, Host Rep
    edited March 2013

    I've had the exact same experience as you.

  • Revnja while we don't claim to be perfect 9/10 of our users rate us at least 8/10 on a scale rating (Customer Survey March 2013). We've log all recorded false alerts and in March we've had 3 confirmed false alerts upon over 50 million checks. I've responded to KuJoe by PM and hopefully he'll be able to update this topic in the near future!

  • KuJoeKuJoe Member, Host Rep

    I've taken @SCDaniel up on his offer and added about 20 monitors to my StatusCake account. You can view all but 5 of them at Drgn.biz. Since I was able to pick the monitoring servers I chose the 3 servers in the US for best connectivity (and frankly if there's any connectivity problems outside of the US there's not much we can do about that).

    As a comparison, here's our Pingdom report that monitors the same Tampa IP as StatusCake: http://stats.pingdom.com/f9bng3rw047t

  • @SCDaniel If I sign up for the Basic account, what does the '2 test locations' mean? Does that mean I get to pick two locations and then those are the only two I can use/test from, or does that mean that you pick which two I can use and limit me to those? I don't much care about multiple locations as much as I care that they are US locations.

  • It means you can pick two test locations (or 1 if you so wish) - so you can pick two US server locations and all tests would be performed from those locations - else if you only pick 1 then it would limit it to that one test. So in summary you get to pick 2 servers to limit testing to from all available locations

    Hope that makes some sense! It's 5am here and I'm trying to hammer down @KuJoe 's issue (well not so much the issue but how it creeped into the system!)

  • Just wanted to say thanks KuJoe for taking us up on that offer. Hopefully you've not had any alerts since - would you mind if I explained to the users here what the problem was? :)

  • That makes perfect sense, @SCDaniel, thanks for answering that question for me. I am going to be moving my stuff over from Pingdom today to give it a try!

  • imperioimperio Member
    edited April 2013

    Unfortunately i had disappointing experience with them.I signed up for the superior plan notifying that they have support for udp and ping protocols.However they do not support it.Daniel accepted the fault and offered a refund or a free upgrade to business plan.But he were not able to provide a clear ETA of udp and ping protocol availability so that i decided to cancel.Btw they removed the udp and ping false advertising after my case..

    Image and video hosting by TinyPic

  • Hey Imperio,

    Agreed 100% That was a fought on our copy. We're rolling out UDP testing but it got pushed back while we worked on ensuring TCP / HTTP checks were running perfectly. The moment you made us aware of the error we corrected the page, it would of been up for less than a day (at max 2 days) and only too a small subset of our A/B testers. If and when you return when we have UDP testing fully in place just contact me for the offer to business from Superior and I'll make sure you get that again! I repeat what I said in the email to you - full apologies and I hope we made good with the refund :D

  • RobertClarkeRobertClarke Member, Host Rep

    My redact my previous comment, as the ICMP system has vastly improved, and I now get 0 false positives.

  • nikcnikc Member

    Love SC, but dont monitor that much with it ..... but never had any false positives and the support guys have been great.

  • @nikc said: monitor

    Thanks for the kind words on support - it's what we really do try to focus on and have introduced a new staff member just this week to ensure we can continue to provide great support to our users!

    Thanks a huge bunch Rob :D

  • liviuliviu Member

    I'm giving StatusCake a try. It doesn't seem to provide monthly reporting, or I am not able to find it.

  • NoermanNoerman Member

    @SCDaniel said: I’ve also free of charge upgraded your account to our best plan at my own personal cost - It is very much my hope that once we work out what exactly the issue was we can resolve it and have you come back and give another review.

    @SCDaniel Could you check my StatusCake too at https://www.statuscake.com/public/4067/

    I just add the monitors, and I have many down status there.
    Can I get free upgrade too?

    ..
    OK, Not going to post something bad since this is FALSE ALARM.
    Down status due the VPS not yet configured or online, so this is my mistake.

    I love StatusCake, a second after I add the first test. But free upgrade is lovable. :)

Sign In or Register to comment.